The Liquid Biopsy Patent Landscape
US-granted liquid-biopsy patents, retrieved by CPC family, scope-classified, and de-duplicated into inventions by patent family (INPADOC).
Two Decades Of Invention
Inventions by earliest priority year (when the idea was first filed). One invention = one patent family, so a US continuation chain or a multi-office filing counts once. Blue is granted; amber is published applications still pending, dated by the same rule and de-duplicated onto the same families. The granted curve falls away after 2018 because recent filings have not issued yet. The pending band is what that fall was hiding. The last years are still short: an application published ~18 months after filing, so 2024 to 2026 has not appeared yet either.
Data table
What Gets Patented
Liquid-biopsy patents are, above all, about the measurement technology: the analyte platform and the method to detect it. Platform is read from the patent text, not the CPC code.
Analyte Platform
Inventions mentioning each platform (one may span several).
Application & Purpose
What the invention is for. Method / device development leads by a wide margin.
Analyte Platform Over Time
Inventions by priority year, stacked by platform. cfDNA/ctDNA (blue) grows into the dominant base through the 2010s while CTCs plateau, and the most recent years are truncated because those filings have not yet issued.
Cancer, And Well Beyond It
Most patents are oncology, but the same scope gate as the research track captures prenatal, transplant, infectious-disease and other non-cancer uses.
Oncology Breadth
Among cancer inventions: tied to one named cancer, versus method-level / pan-cancer. Patents keep this two-way split; the research corpus separates a third, multi-cancer group.
Non-Oncology Fields
Inventions outside oncology, by clinical field.
Which Platforms Serve Which Applications
For each application (row), how many inventions use each analyte platform. Shaded within the row: darker is a bigger share of that application’s inventions.
How Far Protection Extends
Each invention is a patent family that may be filed in many offices. This is where the Chinese footprint becomes visible even in a US-anchored set.
International Footprint
Who Holds The IP
Assignees are the legal owners. Universities feature heavily, because much liquid-biopsy IP is academically owned and licensed to the companies that commercialize it.
Top Assignees
Owners ranked by invention count. A co-owned invention counts under each of its owners. Bars marked • include a government-interest statement.
Highest-Impact Inventions age-normalized
Ranked by forward citations per year since grant (raw counts just rank the oldest). Fam = international family size; Docs = US documents in the family.
China Inventions Over Time
China-only inventions by earliest priority year. This set includes pending applications, so its recent-year picture is fuller than the granted-only US view, though the latest years are still accruing filings.
Data table
What China Patents
Where the US set is dominated by cfDNA/ctDNA, China’s platform mix is broadly spread across protein, circulating RNA and cfDNA, a genuinely different technology profile.
Analyte Platform
CN inventions mentioning each platform.
Application & Purpose
What the CN invention is for.
Analyte Platform Over Time
CN inventions by priority year, stacked by platform.
A Screening-Heavy Landscape
China’s set skews strongly toward screening / early detection, and reaches well beyond oncology into the same non-cancer fields as the rest of the index.
Oncology Breadth
Among CN cancer inventions.
Non-Oncology Fields
CN inventions outside oncology.
Which Platforms Serve Which Applications
CN inventions: analyte platform by application (shaded within each row).
Who Holds The Chinese IP
Assignees (harmonized) on the China-only inventions. As in the US set, universities and hospitals dominate, but Chinese liquid-biopsy companies appear too.
Top CN Assignees
Organizations ranked by invention count. A co-assigned family counts under each owner.